- Venue
- Stephan Weiss Studio
- Location
- United States
The lights go low. Conversations peter out. A single, clear, female voice resonates around Stephan Weiss studio. She is singing a Duke Ellington song and her lone voice – disembodied and unaccompanied – fills the hall and demands the audience’s attention.
Adam Pendleton’s The Revival, a PERFORMA Commission for this year’s biennial, trades on the power of language through meanings and sounds. Pendleton harnesses the energy of gospel, jazz and pop music along with the style of Southern-style religious services to deliver a compelling sermon to his congregation.
The performance is loosely circular. Pendleton’s speech starts and ends with what sounds like a political statement of defiance – a list of things that ‘we broke’, and things that ‘we freed’. In between he ranges from the publically polemic ( a tirade against the US adminstration’s attitude to drugs for HIV/ Aids) to the touchingly private (‘my lover often sits on me to get me to eat’). And there are also ‘testimonials’ from the poet Jena Osman and the artist Liam Gillick, who join Pendleton from the audience like parishioners sharing their experience in church.
But who is Pendleton preaching to? The church set-up makes the audience feel part of a congregation, but the ‘we’ Pendleton speaks about is never explained. When he talks about gay politics is he addressing us as comrades or enemies? He says, ‘I prefer gay people, I think we’re better than everyone else’, and it raises a laugh. Are we laughing with him, as he redirects the bigotry of homophobia through a a parody of self-rightousneess? Or is he laughing at us, trying to shake the liberal conceit of siding with the oppressed?
What, in fact, is Pendleton’s sermon about? Despite the emotive form, the driving music and the charismatic persona, Pendleton’s language never gets to a ‘message’. He repeats phrases and reroutes them, changes round the order of words and switches tone in the midst of an argument. In the end, no argument can emerge. Osman’s and Gillick’s testimonials, meanwhile (the former, about the objectivist poet Charles Raznikoff; the latter, a persuasive speech by a car manufacturer to potential employees) are far from personal. Examples of very different kinds of speaking, they rupture the smoothness of Pendleton’s delivery and draw attention to it. The ‘message’ here is rhetoric as practice, to an emotive jazz and gospel score.
The Revival plays with the functions of language and text. Without specifying who he is preaching to, what he is preaching about, or even his own point of origin, Pendleton charts a dynamic journey through language and sound that leaves the audience uplifted and asking for more. The gospel singer’s voice finishes the performance just how it began, singing about a new day which, ‘brings hope, they say’.
The last part is important. This nameless ‘they’ is the authority of language that The Revival draws on. Mesmerising without being meaningful, The Revival wallows in the investments made in language – its purpose that comes from the people that use it, its authority from the fact of being used. Pendleton waves together different modes of address to deliver a vitruoso demonstration of language’s power.
